Rob Church wrote: Actually, I rather agree. The bad image list, as currently implemented, is a hack that doesn't scale. The only question is, does it need to? As it stands, the limited usefulness of the feature rather deters anyone from adding too many images to the list. The patch I wrote, which allows page-specific exceptions to the list, would likely make it a more attractive solution, but it _still_ is only useful for a rather narrow set of images: ones that are "good" enough that we do want to keep them, and maybe use them on a page or two, but still nasty or shocking enough that they can be used for massive vandalism that can cause significant outrage before it is cleaned up. As long as the list remains (or is kept) short enough that the parsing time isn't significant, a database solution isn't likely to make it any faster. I'm not actually even convinced the list is useful at all. The only reason I wrote that patch, besides the fact that it has been repeatedly requested on-wiki, was in an attempt to make the list at least somewhat more useful given that it does exist. (You seem to be missing a footnote up there, so I'll supply one: [1] They're not actually regexps, just a list of image names that are read into a hash.) This would be my personal favorite, assuming we think the bad image feature is worth spending the effort on. I doubt most wikis really find it useful, so making it an optional extension sounds good. If I was confident I could implement something like that cleanly in a reasonable timeframe, I might've done that myself, but I still consider myself a newcomer to the wonderful world of MediaWiki source code. -- Ilmari Karonen

On 30/06/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam(a)vyznev.net> wrote: Well, en.wp insists on having explicit and confronting images for certain topics, so... At the Commons we occasionally get irate requests to delete certain images because they've been used in vandalism attacks. We are somewhat hesitant to delete them, assuming they're licensed correctly, for the likely backlash of "censorship!". So once we found out about the existence of this, we have been advising wikis to use the Bad image list. But we still delete some images when they seem particularly superfluous and particularly confronting. And by "we" I mean like, me and two other guys who follow these deletion requests on Commons. I'm not a big advocate for the list, but this is my interaction with it. Brianna en.wp,commons:User:pfctdayelise